The province has approved another MRI for the St. John’s region that, it is hoped, will help to alleviate lengthy wait times for a scan, but NAPE says the new equipment won’t help unless there are staff there to keep it running.

Last week, VOCM News was told by NL Health Services that the average wait time for an MRI can range anywhere between 17 weeks to more than a year (427 days). The median wait time for an MRI scan in Canada in 2022 was 10.6 weeks.

Health Minister Tom Osborne says a new machine will be added to the RFP for an MRI in Gander with the aim to have the extra machine up and running in the St. John’s region early in the new year.

They’re hoping that the new MRI will be in place and ready to take patients in January or February if all goes well.

Osborne says, in the meantime, they’ve expanded the hours of operation for existing MRIs and all the machines currently available are fully staffed.

That’s all well and good says NAPE President Jerry Earle, but staff are putting in massive amounts of overtime and he wants to see a concrete plan for hiring and staffing.

“We can put all the machines there we want. We need the people to operate them, in this case…highly-skilled professionals who are in our lab and x-ray bargaining unit,” says Earle. And they’re “trying to catch up right now. What they’re actually doing is pulling from other areas…which is leaving a backlog in those areas.”